Luigi Cherubini

Luigi Cherubini (1760 – 1842) is one of the composers whose works have largely disappeared from the repertoire despite their great popularity during the 19th century. This has something to do with being poised between two musical epochs. Born four years after Mozart and dying fifteen years after Beethoven, Cherubini remained firmly anchored within the Classical style, although living well into the Romantic period.

Cherubini was born in Florence as the son of a harpsichordist and received his musical education in his native city. After his unusually intensive study of the art of counterpoint, he soon gained access to Florentine opera houses. During the 1780s, he sought success in the large musical centres of London and Paris, ultimately settling in the latter capital city in 1788. Cherubini lived through highly turbulent times, arriving in Paris during the end of the ancien régime and witnessing the outbreak of the French Revolution and its subsequent horrors. He then experienced the ascent and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy and the July Revolution in 1830. The wide range of political upheavals had substantial effects on musical institutions and indirectly and sometimes directly on his own life, and yet Cherubini remained one of the most dominant individuals in the musical scene in France at this time. Alongside his compositional activities, he was highly respected as the long-standing director of the famous Conservatoire which became a model for European educational institutions under his supervision.

Cherubini initially gained fame in the 1790s as a composer of operas. For over a decade, he thrilled Parisian audiences as well as poets and intellectuals across the whole of Europe with his so-called ‘terror operas’ and ‘rescue operas’ in which unjustly persecuted victims were miraculously liberated from the clutches of criminal evildoers and the ideals of humanity and solidarity triumphed over iniquitous tyranny. The best-known and only surviving example of this once highly popular operatic type still to be performed is Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’, a work actually influenced by Cherubini. Having already experienced phases of rejection and creative crises, Cherubini gradually lost the support of his audiences due to changing popular taste and turned his back on the operatic world. By around 1810, he had discovered a completely new creative focus within the areas of church and chamber music. Despite a general decrease in compositional productivity, he still succeeded in creating a number of significant works within this field, most particularly his two requiems composed in 1816 (Requiem in C minor) and 1836 (Requiem in D minor).